Natural Causes (30 page)

"I'm glad you called," he said. "Where
are you staying in Las Cruces?"

I gave him the number of the hotel and of my room. I
could hear him writing them down.

"Now what have you got for me?" I said.

"Goldblum called me early this afternoon, right
after you left. He found the charter service that flew Quentin to Las
Cruces. Apparently Quentin didn't use his real name, but the charter
guy recognized him from Sy's description. Dover left L.A. at eight
thirty-five P.M. on Friday night and got into Las Cruces at eleven
forty Mountain time. He came back to L.A. at two-thirty A.M. on
Sunday morning. By the way, Dover left his car in the charter
service's lot."

"Did anyone notice who picked it up? Or who
picked up Dover on Sunday morning?"

"There was nobody on duty when Quentin got back
from Las Cruces. But someone did see a kid pick up the rental car at
around twelve-fifteen A.M. on Saturday morning. The kid was driving a
jalopy and he had a girl with him. Dover had left word that the car
was going to be picked up, so nobody gave the kid any trouble."
"Did Sy get his description?"

"Goldblum thinks it was Jerry Ruiz," Jack
said.

"I'll be damned," I said.

It was certainly possible. Jerry himself had told me
that he'd gotten off duty at eleven-thirty or a quarter of twelve.
That would have allowed him more than enough time to make it out to
the airport by twelve-fifteen. It would also have given him a better
reason to be nervous about Quentin's key. He'd apparently played a
larger part in Dover's plans than I'd thought. It made me that much
more certain that Quentin was desperate to score. Otherwise he
wouldn't have taken a chance on a venal kid like Jerry.

"How about the girl in the car with Ruiz?"
I said. "Any I.D. on her?"

"Goldblum thinks it was Maria Sanchez,"
Jack said. "She was seen leaving the hotel with the Ruiz boy
late Friday night. And when Goldblum got in touch with the Pacoima
police about him, it turned out that they were interested in Jerry
for their own reasons."

"In connection with the murders?"

"I'm not sure. I do know that Jerry is a bad
boy. Goldblum told me to tell you that. He'd been charged with
several unsavory crimes, although he hadn't been convicted on any
charges."

"Was Ruiz ever busted for pushing drugs?"

Jack sighed. "Yeah. But that doesn't necessarily
mean that Quentin was involved in drug pushing."

"If you say so, Jack. Do the Pacoima police have
any idea where Jerry is holed up?"

"Somewhere outside of Pacoima," Moon said.
"That's where he lived, by the way. Goldblum found out through
the Belle Vista desk clerk. Ruiz hasn't been in his room since
Friday. In fact, no one seems to have seen him since he quit his
job." Jack paused for a second. "I've got one more thing to
tell you. It may make all the rest of this unimportant."

"What's that?" I asked.

"Frank wants to talk to you," he said. "He
spoke to Connie this afternoon. She told him about the Leonard
thing."

"All of it?"

"Enough to make Frank nervous," Jack said.

"What do you think Glendora wants to talk to me
about, Jack?"

"Can't you guess?" he said. "Frank
doesn't want trouble. United is his religion."

"Do me a favor, then," I said. "Don't
tell him I was in touch with you. Tear up that piece of paper with
the phone numbers on it, and, if he asks, say that I haven't
contacted you yet."

"How can I stall him, Harry? He knows you're in
Las Cruces and he's been calling me every hour."

"You can do it, Jack," I said. "All I
need's another day or two."

"For what?" Jack said. "What's it
going to amount to, anyway? It's ass-covering time, Harry. And you
might as well face the fact that the truth about Quentin Dover is
going to get lost in the shuffle."

"I still want that day," I said.

"I'll do my best,"
he said. But from the sound of his voice, I figured that Jack Moon
would have been just as happy if the Quentin Dover case had ended
that night.

***

I fell asleep after I drank the Scotch. When I woke
up it was daylight outside. I opened the curtains and took a look at
Las Cruces. There wasn't much to see. No buildings of more than two
or three stories. A few concrete ramps leading to the expressway. The
usual number of fast-food joints, their lots empty in the dawn light.
And the desert, of course. Brown and scintillant in the white morning
sun.

It wasn't the naked kind of desert--the sandy, Sahara
kind. This one was clinging to life--or life was clinging to it. Sage
grass, sprouting in rows like lettuce patches. Agave, like fat
monstrous flowers. And barbed ocatillo. I looked for the twisted
crosses of saguaro, but I didn't see any. No barrel cactus, either,
although there was lobed prickly pear growing in the dirt beneath my
window. In the distance were the mountains--always in the distance,
nearer or farther, in the desert. They turned colors as the sun rose.
At that early hour of the morning they were a bleached-out
yellow--the same color as the sky. But in the evening, they'd purple
like ripening fruit.

I showered and put on some fresh clothes jeans and a
workshirt. Then I went down to the lobby to get something to eat. It
was seven-thirty by the clock above the front desk and the lobby was
just coming to life. The pool area was roped off and deserted, but
the smell of chlorine lingered in the air. A few travelers were
sitting sleepy-eyed at the little tables of the cafe. I joined them,
sitting by myself, drinking coffee and eating Rancher eggs with
chilis and mangos in them. They were good. So was the coffee.

Around eight-thirty, I walked over to the front desk
and asked the clerk how to get to the old town square. She gave me
some simple directions. I thanked her and went out to the parking
lot. It smelled like the desert outside--hot, dry, and clean. The
heat was already starting up. That close to the border, it would
probably go well over a hundred by noon. But it wasn't a sapping
heat. It was more like the heat from an open fire. If you moved, it
made you warm without burning you. If you stood still for too long,
it began to hurt.

I started the Mustang up and followed the road that
ran beneath the concrete ramps of the highway, along the eastern edge
of town. To my right, residential streets, full of small ranch houses
and Spanish bungalows, led across town. To my left, the desert
extended all the way to the El Capitan mountains. There were a few
ranch houses scattered on the desert side and a few more at the foot
of the mountains. I couldn't see much of them from the car just
stucco walls and window glass blazing in the sun.

About two miles up the road, I turned right, down one
of the crosstown drags. The nearer to the center of town I got, the
fancier the homes became. Some of them were very handsome. White
haciendas with adobe walls--like thick slices of whole wheat
bread--and belltowers and watchtowers rising from their flat tiled
roofs. In the middle of town, the road narrowed to the width of an
alley and the pavement gave way to cobblestone. I crept along behind
a row of very old, weathered, one-story buildings. Then I saw the
church belfries, soaring above the flat rooftops, and I knew I was
behind the town square. I pulled over and parked. A pedestrian alley
ran between the buildings. I got out of the car and walked up it to
the square.

There was a promenade in its center, brown with
grass, and an old bandstand painted white and red. A cobbled street
circled the promenade, running past the row of beaten buildings, in
front of the church, then down the other side of the promenade where
a second row of one-story buildings formed the third side of the town
square. Most of the buildings housed shops-restaurants, silversmiths,
antique stores, a gun shop. The church dominated the square. It was
massive, cut-stone, Spanish colonial, with a heavily ornamented
portal in front and twin belfries on either side. There were a few
steps leading up to it. I didn't see anyone standing on the stairs,
but it was just ten of nine.

I wandered down the dusty sidewalk, reading the
historical markers on the buildings. The store at the far end of the
square--away from the church--was built like a stone garrison. It
looked very old. The marker on the door said that it had been a jail
at one time. At another time, it had been the seat of the New Mexican
territorial government. Billy the Kid had been incarcerated there by
Marshal Pat Garrett. And, before that, the Gadsden Purchase had been
signed in the building. I went in. It was an antique and curio shop
now. A rugged-looking woman, her skin weathered by the sun, was
standing behind a glass-and-wood display counter, full of silver belt
buckles and silver and turquoise Indian jewelry.

"Was Billy the Kid really jailed here?" I
asked her.

She looked at me disinterestedly. "That's what
the sign says, doesn't it? He was jailed here before they moved him
up to Lincoln county. That's where he made most of the trouble."

I knew a few of the names. Tunstall and Chisolm. I'd
heard them in movies or read them in books. But the crowded little
room, with its thick stone walls and worn beam ceiling, didn't look
like anything out of a movie. It looked like a provisioner's store.
Small, windowless, full of goods.

"How old is this building?" I asked.

"It goes back a long way," the woman said
with a touch of pride. "To the Spanish missionaries. This used
to be the chief city of New Mexico. Mesilla was the capital of the
territory for a while." She sounded wistful and a little soured,
as if she resented the fact that they'd moved the capital to Santa
Fe.

"He was a right bastard, you know," she
said as I walked back to the door.

"Who?"

"Billy the Kid. He was a liar and a killer. All
that crap about how the Mexicans loved him? That was just crap. They
hated him. They were afraid of him. He was crazy."

"I'm disappointed to hear it," I said.

"Most people are," the woman said.

I walked back up the sidewalk to the church. There
was a man sitting on the steps. I couldn't see him clearly until I
got to the head of the square. He was wearing jeans and a white
cotton shirt. His hair was glossy black, parted in the middle, and
combed down flat on either side of his head. He had a small moustache
and a lean, brown, pockmarked face. He wasn't very big, but he
had big muscles in his arms. He looked as if he'd worked hard all his
life. There was a mark on his face. I thought it was a birthmark
until I walked up to him. But it wasn't a birthmark; it was a tiny
teardrop, tattooed in fading blue ink at the corner of his left eye.

"Mr. Ramirez?" I said.

The man stood up. "I'm Jorge Ramirez."

"Harry Stoner."

I held out my hand and we shook. I towered over the
little man. He couldn't have been more than five seven or five eight.
His white shirt billowed at his belt, as if it were several sizes too
large for him.

"How can I help you, senor?" he said.

"I'd like you to take me to Dover's ranch,"
I said. "Can you do that?"

"Of course."

"And would you mind answering some questions,
too?"

"I wouldn't mind," he said placidly. "The
ranch is in the hills. We need a car."

"We can take mine."

"Better take my jeep," Ramirez said. "It's
pretty rough road out there."
 

36

I followed Ramirez across the promenade to another
walkway that ran between a couple of buildings on the far side of the
square. His jeep was parked in an alley, behind the gunsmith's shop.
It was an open-topped jeep, with a rollbar on it. It looked fairly
beaten.

As I got in, I asked him how far away the ranch was.

"Ten miles. Not far."

"And where's the airfield in Las Cruces?"

The man pointed south. "Same direction. 'Bout
five miles."

"Did you pick Dover up at the airfield this
weekend?"

He nodded. "On Friday night."

"Do you know why he came to Las Cruces?"

"He came about the ranch," Ramirez said.
"We talk about it last week. It gave him a lot of trouble, with
the floods and all. He made up his mind he was gonna sell it."

"And that's what he came here for?"

"Yeah," the man said. "He tol' me last
week he'd got a buyer. A rancher from Texas."

I sat back on the jeep seat. "Did he sell it?"

Ramirez nodded again. "I think so. On Saturday.
He didn' want to sell it--I'm sure. But . . . "

Ramirez spread his hands in a gesture of
helplessness.

"You were his overseer?"

"Yeah." He started the jeep up and we took
off with a lurch.

The wind was too loud to hold a conversation over. So
I just sat back and took in the view. Ramirez drove east to the road
I'd been on, turned south onto it, and headed away from town toward
Mexico. There was a mountain range on the southwest horizon. Eight
miles down the road, Ramirez turned onto a dirt lane that led to the
mountains. There was a ranch built on the side of one of the
foothills. Even at a distance, I could tell that it was a big spread.
A dry wash ran past it, coming down the mountainside and cutting
across the desert floor. The dirt of the wash was yellow and cracked.
The jeep shook as we crossed over it. The ranch house was a quarter
of a mile further down the road. Ramirez pulled up in front of it.
There was a "For Sale by Owner" sign stuck in the yard,
with a "Sold" sticker pasted over it.